Imagine sitting on your front porch in a Midwest city enjoying 75-degree temperatures at 6:10 p.m. on an early November day. A nice last gasp of warmth before the winter ahead sets in.

By 6:20 p.m., gusty northwest winds have taken over and in an instant you're running inside for a wardrobe change as the temperature plummets to 49 degrees. The mercury in your thermometer continues to fall through the evening and seven hours later you are shivering as the temperature bottoms out at 17 degrees.

Does this 58-degree drop from warm to frigid in a matter of hours sound impossible? It's not. This is what happened 100 years ago on 11/11/1911 in St. Louis, Mo.

The culprit was a fast moving and very strong arctic cold front, pictured below, that moved from the Midwest to the East Coast by early in the morning on November 12. If you think the St. Louis example is dramatic, it's just the beginning.

It's very unusual to look at the daily weather almanac for a particular city and see the record high and low temperatures for a particular day set in the same year. The arctic cold front made this rarity happen in several cities on November 11, 1911.

The almanac for Oklahoma City, Okla. from weather.com is shown below. Highlighted in the red box you can see a record high of 83 degrees was set during the afternoon. Just before midnight, a new record low of 17 degrees was established. The drop in temperatures between these records is 66 degrees!

Oklahoma City weather almanac for November 11.

Springfield, Mo. is another one of the cities with a standing record high and low from November 11, 1911.

A record high of 80 degrees (tied in 1980) was set at 3:45 p.m. that afternoon. By 7:00 p.m., the temperature had fallen to 21 degrees before bottoming out at a record low of 13 degrees just before midnight.

In addition to the falling temperatures, Springfield saw wind gusts to 74 mph with the frontal passage. Thunderstorms brought hail and rain, which turned to sleet just under two hours after reaching 80 degrees.

Will the atmosphere repeat itself 100 years later on 11/11/2011? Fortunately, the answer is no. Friday's weather will be of the benign variety across much of the central region.